1028 I’m A Delivery Boy.

The other day Adobe decided to give away Photoshop CS2. I’ve been using CS for… I don’t know how long. It was relatively stable on my older system, but less so on the new one, so I decided to at least try 2. It’s more or less the same program, but stable. So far the crash glitches in CS are not present in 2, which is good. It’s also a little faster. There are some strange changes to the names of things that I don’t see the point of, but I was able to recreate my art settings after going online and looking up how to do it. It’s a good thing too because the new downloads of my coloring plugin are $100 apiece now. I understand the desire to be compensated for your work, but damn. I’ll keep these old janky versions for now… Photoshop CS is very similar to Elements 3, which is what I started with. I tried to upgrade to 5, but ended up deleting it because they made it straigh photo editing software basically. Like those bullshit greeting card creator programs that were all the rage in the 90s. It was basically unusable for me. I came upon CS by chance essentially. It had a few more features that I learned to use, but was basically the same, so no learning cure to speak of. I’m sure I spoke of it at the time though… Anyway, like I said, CS2 is virtually identical, so now that it’s sorted things can go along as normal, but slightly better. The main problem with CS was that it didn’t understand multiple proccessors. It would crash while trying to do very specific actions. Actions that I did a lot. It was a crap shoot. It would go for weeks just fine, then one day it would pitch a fit and not work for a while. The reasons for the trouble were beyond me, and I hope I never need think of them again.

There’s actually a selection of free old software on adobe’s site now. I’m not sure what the various functions of them all are, but I might try them just to see.

Adobe is probably getting scared of all the free graphics software, it’s getting a bit too competitive so they want to throw a bone for those who can’t pay hundreds of dollars for an image manipulation software… they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant, what with flash being slowly replaced by html5 and no one needing their .pdf tools…

LOL! Mike’s got it right. “I’m not really a manager. I’m a messenger,” hits the nail square on the head! Now more than ever, corporations try to formulate a set of business rules so comprehensive and complete that nobody needs to think and everything will work exactly the way they think it ought to. It’s the same as in the 1950′s and THE ORGANIZATION MAN. They’re still trying to make their businesses independent of the competence of their employees. Ha! Ha! The truth is: 1) it can’t be done, 2) they don’t even come close and 3) without independent creativity, even if it’s clandestine, unreported and contrary to company policy, their stinking, penny ante little businesses would all fail outright. The truth is that without the likes of Thomas, Carol, Nina, Brooksie (Oh. How I love you, girl! Let’s blow this pop stand and… sorry, back on topic, now), et al, there would be no business. If it succeeds, they’ll credit their own fictional far-reaching insight and vastly self-overestimated management ability, but let it fail and they’ll blame their lazy, unproductive employees or any other external circumstance. Never, ever is it their own incompetence, greed or blindness to reality that’s at fault. (OK, Brooksie. That should do it. Let’s blow this pop stand, now).

Central control has the advantage of (at least in theory) making sure that if there is a right way to do something everyone is doing it. The downside is that if there is a wrong way to do it – everyone does it wrong too…
And of course there are things that vary from location to location and need to be adjusted accordingly. Honey baked ham would probably not do so well in a Hasidic neighborhood for example so a cookie cutter shopping center organization might want to leave that one out when they build in certain neighborhoods. One of the big problems we have now in business is an extension of this idea of one universal way to do things. A business is a business so any MBA can manage it the same way right? WRONG! A lot of things that work well in one retail situation are incredibly stupid in another retail business. Managing a hospital is quite different from managing a construction business which is different from managing a software development company which is different from managing the research department of a chemical manufacturing company.